The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for providing a multi-attribute relation network visualization and interaction interface which utilizes a grid-based method of visualization.
Relation networks are commonly encountered in many domains where people need to model the connections between entities to better understand patterns. Such relation networks are typically visualized as a node-link diagram where the objects or entities are represented as points/nodes in the diagram and the relations are represented as lines, or edges, between these points/nodes. This method of visualizing relation networks is intuitive and allows tracing multi-step paths. However, such visualization does not scale well beyond very small examples due to significant overlap and clutter of the visualization as the relation network grows and involves an increasing number of points/nodes and lines/edges. Although work has been done to generate layout algorithms to reduce clutter, the layout issue is a non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) computational problem with no general solutions.
The need for good relation network models is ubiquitous across almost every industry and application, including areas such as financial transaction networks, communications, social network analytics, protein genomics, and the like.